Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Welcome to the 'state of Morocco' in Israel...

Israel has never been a western state, and it is only in the eyes of its Europhile cultural elite that the state's increasing Middle Eastern-ness is concerning and unacceptable. Thoughtful piece by Seth Frantzman on his blog, Terra Incognita (with thanks: Michelle):

The Revivo music project: why should there be no Moroccan culture in a country with so many Moroccans?

Twenty- three percent of Israelis in 2009 said they would consider
leaving the country if Iran obtained a nuclear bomb, in a survey by the
Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Two years later
only 11% said they would consider leaving. Self-defined left-wing
Israelis were more concerned. Most Israelis said they thought Iran
would get a bomb and most of them would stay.

What the survey
tells us is there is a minority of Israelis who are prepared to leave
the country; many already have children who live abroad. These Israelis
tend to be more left-leaning, self-identify as having “Western values”
and are concerned about the country becoming less Western. They are
wealthier and their European origins give them access to a foreign
passport. This last issue is important when it comes to identity.

Almost
three quarters of Israelis have their origins either in pre-state
Palestine or in the Middle East and Africa. This includes the quarter
of Israelis who are Arab. A minority of Israelis have origins in
Europe. Yet the European minority still feels like a cultural majority.
During this year’s Independence Day torch lighting ceremony, an
Israeli journalist complained that there was too much “Mizrahi”
(eastern) music and that the ceremony had “established the State of
Morocco” in Israel.

Why did he think there should be no Moroccan culture in a country with so many Moroccans?

In
1946 there were only 543,000 Jews in Palestine. Between 1954 and 1964,
according to the Immigrant Absorption Ministry, around 250,000 Jews
came to Israel from Morocco. You’d think the musical impact of that
community, almost a third of the country’s population at the time,
would be immediate and that by 2017 European-origin Israelis would no
longer be whining about it. But they still are whining, because for some
of them Israel cannot have diversity, it cannot have Ethiopian
culture, or Russian culture, or Moroccan or Iranian or even Arabic
culture. These Israelis have waged a jihad against everything
non-Western since 1948, and they have lost.

To those Israelis
who dreamed of Israel being a “villa in the jungle,” a kind of Denmark
in the Middle East, or a kind of Rhodesia, everything that was
non-European was “primitive.” Journalist Ari Shavit asked fellow writer
Amos Elon if Israel had this “primitiveness” in a 2004 interview and
Elon agreed; the “primitiveness” comes from the Arab countries, he
said. What he meant was Jews from those countries.

This colonial
mentality of a subset of Israeli society cannot accept that Israel is
not a Western country, that it has major influences from non-European
peoples and cultures. It is a hybrid civilization, with Western
currents in it but a foundation that is rooted in the Middle East.
Jewish civilization has always had that hybridity. Since the time of
the Hasmoneans fighting the Greeks and the war with Rome, or the
expulsion from Spain at the hands of Catholic Europeans, Jewish history
has been East struggling with the West.

Some Jewish thinkers cannot accept this. Richard Cohen in his 2014 book Israel: Is it Good for the Jews
predicted what would happen when Israel’s “fighting intellectual,
rifle in one hand and a volume of Kierkegaard in the other,” became a
minority and “Jews from Islamic lands” became the majority. Cohen
didn’t realize Israel was never a country of “Jews holding Kierkegaard
in one hand.” This was a myth invented among American Jews about
Israel, in order to convince themselves Israel was like a miniature
version of the Upper West Side in New York, only with tanks and a flag.

Why
the fear of “Jews from Islamic lands,” who are presented as barbarians
by Israel’s European-rooted writers and their fellow travelers abroad?
The same “Western values” that welcome Syrian refugees in Europe
despise Syrian Jews in Israel? The same people who value the diversity
Moroccan immigrants bring to Paris despise Moroccan Jews in Israel.

Because
Israel’s Europhile cultural minority is rooted in a different time,
the era of Rhodesia and the Old South, when non-Europeans were still
openly called primitives. They cannot accept that Israel is not a
Western state and that the revolution of Zionism has overthrown
Europeanism in “their” Levant. They cannot accept the hybrid culture of
Israel. This is why they imagine that only when Israelis are not
“welcomed” in Europe will Israelis end the occupation of the West Bank.

But
the majority of Israelis today don’t care about being welcomed in
Europe and don’t seek European approval. They don’t see themselves as
primitives begging for acceptance in the halls of Paris or Berlin. They
are proud of their society, and they don’t think that they need to beg
acceptance from the grandchildren of Nazis.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)